#fictional-characters

#fictional-characters

One need not be queer to be a queer icon.Take Cher "Do You Believe in (Heterosexual) Love After (Heterosexual) Love" Sarkisian.Or Madonna "Justify My (Straight) Love" Ciccone.In a way, the mantle of "queer icon" is like a lifetime achievement award for the straights.And we can get touchy when people are too hasty in deeming someone - or, cringe, themselves - a queer icon.

This month's mix of titles leaving Netflix in the United States include two coming-of-age comedy dramas, a twisty thriller throwback, a wrenching Holocaust documentary and two uproarious comedies (one of them smuggled into an animated family film).Give them a stream before they're gone.(Dates reflect the last day a title is available.)

By Jan Wahl-
Just when I thought I couldn't have more respect for Lady Gaga, she made an artistic choice at the Oscars that blew me away.She at first appeared in the audience, dressed and made up beautifully, as only Gaga can.Less than a half hour later, she appeared onstage, completely sans makeup, in jeans and a t-shirt.

Popular baby names are tempting, aren't they?At the height of their popularity, the names of celebrities, fictional characters, and cultural icons seem to have an outsize beauty, power, and influence.Surely Game of Thrones couldn't do anything to ruin the great name of Daenerys, right?For parents interested in bucking baby-naming trends, baby names plucked from popular culture can have a one-of-a-kind ring to them... unless thousands of other soon-to-be-parents are thinking along the same lines.

An artist who bent a full-sized roller coaster into the skeletal form of a woolly mammoth is among four nominees who have been shortlisted for this year's Turner Prize.Oxford-born Jesse Darling's exhibitions No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at Camden Art Centre were praised for using a series of consumer goods, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols to evoke the vulnerability of the human body.

You know what the best nights really need?It's not thumping music and frenetic energy.It's not massive venues full of people jostling each other and spilling drinks as they exclaim 'BEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE.' No, we're getting too old for that.The best nights are spent in cosy surroundings, with delicious drinks, and touches of luxury.

Russell Banks' 1985 breakout novel, Continental Drift, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.He's pictured above in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in December 2007.Thony Belizaire/AFP via Getty Images American novelist and activist Russell Banks died on Sunday of cancer at the age of 82.Banks built an A-list literary career writing about working-class families and immigrants who struggle on the margins of American life.

Creating a playlist with friends is a special form of intimacy.Curating the vibe between songs, ensuring everyone has something they'll love in the queue, and listening to it together during any occasion is a way to feel close to your BFFs.On Spotify, features like Blends have made it easy to create playlists that have something for everyone and another feature called Friends Mix takes those Blends to a whole new level.

User personas have always been a controversial concept within the UX community.Well, I'm here to put an end to the controversy.Just stop using them.At best, they're a distraction.At worst, they're entirely based upon biases and assumptions - as much as we'd like to claim they're not.No matter how noble the intent, they're always almost made up of who we think we're solving a problem for, but not the actual people we're solving for.

The team behind Muss and Turner's, MTH Pizza, and Local Three just opened another Atlanta restaurant together, this time an Atlanta version of a "21st-century diner" in Buckhead called Roshambo.Taking over the former Another Broken Egg Cafe space in the Peachtree Battle Shopping Center, Roshambo is what partners chef Chris Hall, Ryan Turner, and Todd Mussman refer to as their "love letter to Atlanta" in both menu and design.

Works by Andy Warhol are to be shown in Dublin as part of Ireland's largest display of pop art.
he Pop Art Pioneers exhibition at Gormleys will showcase 2 million euro worth of works by Warhol and fellow US artists Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Robert Indiana.It will feature Warhol's silkscreen portraits, Lichtenstein's The Den, Haring's graphic designs and Indiana's LOVE artworks.

Microsoft's Bing AI is hiding a "Celebrity" mode that can impersonate notable public figures in its answers, BleepingComputer reports, an early sign that the company could be looking to expand on the AI's uncanny ability to entertain - rather than inform - users.A simple request to turn on "Celebrity mode" prompts Bing Chat to imitate a household name of your choosing.

Every year since 2016, music fans and artists all over the world anticipate the release of Spotify Wrapped, the streaming platform's annual data-tracking-turned-cool breakdown of music stats and rankings.Since the 2022 drop of Spotify Wrapped, your social media has likely flooded by friends sharing their top songs, artists, genres, and other streaming details for the year (with data collection actually ending a bit early on Oct. 31).